


like a flower bending in the breeze

by shaypotter



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb Widogast Deserves Nice Things, Canon Compliant, Dancing, F/M, Feelings, Fluff, Future Fic, Getting Together, just so much fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2020-01-01 07:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18331418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaypotter/pseuds/shaypotter
Summary: “Alright, listen up, assholes. This is a crash course in dancing and I don’t want to hear shit from any of you. You wanted my help and we’re gonna learn some shit today.”The Mighty Nein learns to dance.





	like a flower bending in the breeze

“Alright, listen up, assholes. This is a crash course in dancing and I don’t want to hear shit from any of you. You wanted my help and we’re gonna learn some shit today.”

Caleb pinches at the bridge of his nose and reminds himself that he cares for Beauregard. She is his friend. The urge to walk out of the room grows stronger by the minute but he’s suffered worse than dancing lessons so he remains in place. His friends make up a poor line on either side of him, Nott shuffling awkwardly and Yasha’s strong shoulder brushing against his own. Caleb sends a glance at the barbarian, brow quirking, and Yasha responds with her own raised eyebrow. He suppresses a smile and turns back to face their drill instructor.

Beau crosses her arms and attempts a stern expression. _She mainly looks constipated_ , he thinks with twitching lips. “We’ve got a party in four days. You all stand out typically, but when you have to dance? I’m not taking the risk that you’re going to blow our cover. We promised whatever-that-guy’s name is that we won’t make a mistake.”

Fjord raises his hand. Beau inhales slowly, searching for the strength to not kill them all, but rolls her eyes and nods. “What? If you’ve got something sarcastic or unhelpful to say then shut up.” Fjord’s hand sinks back to his side and Caduceus gives a huff of laughter. He can hear Jester giggling along somewhere further down the line. “You all think you’re so goddamn funny…” the monk mumbles to herself before stepping further into the center of their room.

Their whole group is crowded into the training room of Caleb’s _magnificent mansion_ in a halfhearted semicircle. Beau stands in the middle, arms planted on her hips and expression fierce. Caleb wonders, for a moment, if he should tell them that he already knows how to dance but the gleam in Beau’s eye keeps him quiet. “Alright. Fjord, you’re with Nott.” Nott hisses in response and Fjord flips her off across the room. “Duce, you’ll be with Yasha. Caleb and Jester pair up,” she finishes in a too-casual tone. His friends move around him to follow her orders but Caleb keeps a glare angled on Beau’s smirking face. Beau ignores his stare and Caleb briefly considers shouting out to the room that Beau has been dreaming of Yasha for weeks now.

“Why are you looking at Beau like she threw up on Frumpkin?” Caleb shifts his heated glare from Beau and in the time it takes to meet Jester’s eye he can feel his entire face soften. Even his shoulders feel a little less tense with her this close. He’s not sure how Jester manages to calm him with so little effort, but he isn’t going to complain about it.

Caleb offers a hand to Jester and merely shakes his head. “It is nothing. She thinks she’s being funny.” Jester offers a little hum of thought but takes his hand instead of replying. He curls his own around hers, feeling the chill of her skin, and places his hand respectfully on her lower back. Her own open hand rests gently below his shoulder, rooting him to her with a soft touch.

“You aren’t dancing with your grandmother, Caleb, you’re dancing with a _woman_. Act less like…” Beau is standing next to them now and just gestures at his whole person. “You, or whatever.” The monk places a hand on Jester’s back and pushes until they’re pressed chest to chest. Jester blinks up at Caleb with a pretty blush spreading over her face and Caleb wants to lean down and press a kiss to her nose, which is crinkled up in such a cute way -

Caleb resists the urge to groan. His brain is obnoxious most days, but he’s really regretting climbing out of bed today.

“Ja, ja, sorry for being _respectful,”_ he shouts at Beau’s retreating back. The monk has known of his… Interest in Jester for some time now. When he had asked how Beau how she had figured it out, Beau had laughed in his face for a solid minute before walking away. So, apparently he has not been as discreet as he had hoped. And now Beau has made it her duty to force them together whenever the situation calls for it. And sometimes even when it doesn’t.

Jester laughs in his arms and Caleb can feel her move with it. He soaks in the sound and feels like a hopeless sap even as he does. When did he get so lost on her? He never used to be so… Smitten. “Caleb,” the tiefling scolds playfully, “what makes you think I want you to be respectful? Maybe I like you close,” her mouth quirks into a wicked, wicked grin and Caleb knows that he shouldn’t respond, should focus on the dance, but he rises to her bait anyways.

The hand on her back slips lower, until just the tips on his fingers brush against the swell of her full bottom. Caleb changes the light pressure on her back to that of something more forceful, strong, possessing. Closer to how he wishes he could touch her. His hand tightens around her own and he drops his mouth to skim against her ear. “Is this what you wanted?” His voice sounds hoarse to his own ears but Caleb doesn’t have time to regret his choices before Jester is nodding.

“Yes,” she murmurs back somewhat breathily. “That is better.” Caleb pulls back and searches Jester’s face for answers, to understand what she’s looking for from him, before music starts playing from his near-transparent servants. Beau starts shouting something about keeping rhythm and _”Nott, let go of Fjord’s ear you-”_ but Caleb is numb to it all.

He is entirely wrapped up in the soft music flowing through the room and the feel of dancing with Jester. Caleb remembers a night so long ago in a tavern with Jester bundled close in his arms long before he knew that he loved her. Oh, he had cared for her (who could meet her and not care for her?) but he had not yet fallen into whatever madness lives within him now.

That night he had danced with a shadow from his former life. He had looked at Jester’s beautiful face and seen Astrid staring right back at him. Today, all he can see is Jester. Freckles spotted across the bridge of her nose and her round cheeks. Her dark eyes, sparkling with a challenge that Caleb always wants to match. Mostly, he thinks, he loves her easy smile. Wide and happy, unafraid and purely Jester. All of it is so distinctly her that he is surprised he ever confused her for another. Caleb knows now that he would never be able to make that mistake again.

“Caleb?” Jester prompts after a couple minutes of quiet dancing. Beau is leaving them mostly alone except for triumphant little grins shot his way while trying to herd their friends in a poor imitation of a waltz. Caleb and Jester spin around easily, without thought, and it feels more and more like they are in their own tiny bubble.

Caleb clears his throat of the feelings threatening to escape it. “Yes, liebling?” He doesn’t mean for his voice to be as gentle as it is, but he can’t help himself when it comes to Jester. She has always brought out the best in him, from the very beginning, but Caleb is almost starting to feel like himself even when Jester isn’t near. He’s a long way from healing, of being worthy of her… But it is a start.

Jester’s lips quirk up at the pet name. “You always call me that. Liebling.” The accent is all wrong when she says it, but the meaning is clear. Caleb nods, giving her hand a quick squeeze.

“Ja, well.” He clears his throat again and offers Jester a small smile. His smiles feel much more genuine these days. “You are quite dear to me. You know this.” Jester looks up at him with those deep eyes and nods slowly. She looks curious which never bodes well for Caleb. He wonders briefly if he should stumble and ruin their dance to break her train of thought but Jester is smarter than his tricks.

“Yeah, I know, but you don’t call the others that stuff. Liebling. Meine liebe.” She is watching him with those damned eyes, her body is pressed so closely to his, and Caleb wants her so badly he can hardly stand it. She’s been paying attention (she’s so much more observant than anyone gives her credit for) to the slips he makes when he is feeling particularly sentimental, the days where it feels like his feelings for her are bubbling so close to the surface that they will explode if he doesn’t release them in some way. He hadn’t thought…

Well, he had hoped Jester would not think to question his endearments.

Caleb opens his mouth to reply, with what he isn’t quite sure, but he is saved from answering by the music abruptly cutting out and Beau’s haggard sounding shout from the other side of the room. “I can’t do this, we’re done for today and we’ll try tomorrow. The only two who don’t totally blow are Caleb and Jester.” Beau heaves a sigh and turns to march up the stairs, presumably to the bar Caleb had designed for her.

The others file upstairs with some grumbling and light laughter. Jester and Caleb remain where they stopped, no longer touching but still close. Close enough for him to feel the slight rise and fall of her chest brushing his, to smell the sweet pastries she had eaten that morning. Caleb clenches his hands into fists at his side and tries to shake out the tingling sensation crawling through his extremities.

Jester is the one to break the silence. “You treat me differently than you treat the others. You notice when I’m pissed, or sad and everyone else thinks I’m fine - but you see it. You always see _me,”_ she says as she presses a hand to her chest. Caleb is spinning with the turn the conversation has taken. Jester’s cheeks are flushed, either with the passion of her words or with embarrassment but she doesn’t look ashamed. If anything, she looks indignant. “Tell me why you can see through me Caleb. Tell me how.”

Caleb is helpless against her. When she asks something of him, Caleb can’t help but spill the truth. Well, at least parts of it. “I see pieces of myself reflected in you.” His own hand drops to his chest, to rest over the spot where his heart pounds, mirroring her position. “I see you because I feel like we are… The same. You’re not…” the wizard hesitates for a split second, “You aren’t as damaged as me, but I know you feel so much. You feel things very deeply.”

Jester watches him, waiting. Caleb is again powerless against her wishes. The words keep flowing even as they burn like fire up his throat. “I treat you differently because I… feel differently for you. Nott is my family. Beau, Caduceus, Yasha, Fjord… they are all my family.”

The tiefling seems to recoil and Caleb places a hand against her cheek. He cups her face and keeps her gaze on his. If he’s going to destroy their friendship then he is going to do it the right way. No more holding back. “I wake up and I think of you. I fall asleep, thinking of you. When we ride I remain close to you so I can hear you even as I read. Liebling, meine liebe, meine licht… You are those things to me. You keep a piece of me even when we are apart. You are the best of all of us, we all already know this to be true. But you are the best parts of me now, too.”

Caleb thinks he’s going to be sick, or maybe like he’s going to bolt up the stairs and out of his mansion as he waits for any sort of reaction from Jester. Her face remains serene and she stares up at him for the longest few moments of his entire life before a smile plays along the edges of her lips.

“You’re really stupid you know.”

Caleb huffs out a weak laugh. Her voice sounds so sure, so steady, that he hardly knows how to reply. “Thank you. That is exactly what a man wants to hear after he’s offered his heart to you, liebling.”

Jester’s beautiful, dear face is gentle as she watches him. “You’re really dumb. Like, really, really dumb.” Caleb rolls his eyes and opens his mouth to tell her, ‘Yes I get it, you think I’m an idiot,’ but he doesn’t get any words out before Jester twines her arms around his neck and hauls him into a searing kiss. His arms remain useless at his side for one second, two seconds, three seconds before he gains control of himself and gathers her in close.

She sighs into his mouth, lush and sweet and perfectly her. Jester pulls back after a moment and fixes him with a frustrated glare. How she manages to feel so much in so little time he hardly knows, but he doesn’t care if it means he gets to kiss her again. He’ll suffer through a hundred glares if they are preceded with her kiss. “I’ve been trying to figure you out for months, Caleb, and you just spend all this time being sweet and caring, but how do I know if you mean it like -”

Caleb cuts her off with another kiss, this one lifting her off the floor in his fervor. Her legs wrap around his waist and his hands drop to support her, pressing into her thighs and keeping her close. She laughs against his mouth even as he presses kisses to the edges of her smile. “I am in love with you, Jester. I am so stupidly, stupidly in love with you that I hardly know what to do with it.”

Jester gives him that same wicked smile that he has seen a thousand times, but this time it ignites something dark and dangerous deep in his belly. He knows now that this smile is for him. “I know what you could do with it,” she gives him a lewd wink and Caleb resists the urge to roll his eyes and instead plants another kiss on her lips.

“Ja, I might have a few ideas too,” he admits as he returns her back to the ground. He is a man in love, for certain, but he knows he can’t hold her up and kiss her much longer without some sort of a support.

Like a wall.

Caleb files that thought away for later.

Jester’s smile shifts into something a little softer, a little more genuine. Those pieces of herself that she keeps so deeply hidden beneath her happy masks settles plainly across her features. He forgets how serious she can be when she wants to. “I love you too, Caleb. I don’t know for how long. I just… Woke up one day, and it was like… Oh.” She shrugs, some of her hair falling in front of her face. “I just knew it like how I know my spells. It isn’t something I can explain, it just… happened.”

Caleb takes her hands in his and presses them against his chest, over the spot where his heart _thump-thumps_ away. The heart that has been hers for such a long time now. A heart that is shriveled and broken, burnt and scarred - but hers, without a doubt. “Does this mean I’m converting to follow the Traveler?”

Jester laughs, loud and happy between them. “Oh yeah. You’re going to be his most devoted follower now. You have to start drawing dicks on everything and I require at least one prank per day.” 

Caleb grins back. He’s not sure that he will ever be able to stop smiling. “Ja, well, where you go I will follow, Jester Lavorre.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is entirely thanks to a prompt from LoveWithaGirl who gave me Widojest dancing, but sober. This is certainy a giant hunk of cheesiness but I had a lot of fun writing it. 
> 
> As always, many thanks to the love of this community. Thanks for taking the time to support and leave comments and kudos.


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